Examination of Witnesses (Questions 53
- 59)
TUESDAY 6 JANUARY 2004
PROFESSOR RICHARD
BLACK, PROFESSOR
RONALD SKELDON,
DR BEN
ROGALY AND
DR PRIYA
DESHINGKAR
Q53 Chairman: Welcome, and thank
you very much for coming. Our clerk is very concerned that we
do not wander too far down the road of asylum and asylum seekers
because, as he keeps on telling me, this is all done by the Home
Affairs Select Committee. However, in terms of vocabulary, it
occurs to me that there are some words, like "refugees",
which are a bit ambiguous, so can we talk about either "migrants"
or, if needs be, "asylum seekers" then we will not get
confused. Can I also declare a sort of informal interest in that
Ron Skeldon very kindly taught me last term at Sussex and Ben
has the misfortune of teaching me next term at Sussex, and I am
very grateful to both of them. No greater love hath a Member of
a Select Committee who actually buys one of the witnesses' books
or reads it! It is a very good book, although I think I am right
in saying, Ron, that the whole book comes to only one conclusion,
which is that "young men migrate".
Professor Skeldon: One general
conclusion.
Chairman: All right. The purpose of this
afternoon, really, is that we are going to ask a number of questions
to prompt you to share with us your thoughts. So these are, really,
pegs, and how you divide up the answers is entirely a matter for
you. It will not necessarily be that on every question you all
want to answer, but we will start and see how we get on.
Q54 Tony Worthington: Starting in
very general terms and trying to understand migration and the
factors (one assumes) behind it—like poverty, insecurity,
inequality or opportunity—how do you rank those? When you
are trying to explain migration what are the main building blocks
of that explanation?
Professor Skeldon: Let me try
and introduce it this way: I was working in Papua New Guinea and
you can look at the Papua New Guinea societies before European
contact, operating within traditional systems of migration within
valleys; they did not feel themselves poor, they did not know
that until they were contacted by outsiders. They had a lot of
idle time, they had ample food but, of course, in our terms they
had not the basics of what we would call development—running
water, sewerage systems and so on. I do not want to suggest for
a minute that they were living in paradise but they did not feel
themselves poor. Once there is contact with the outside world
then people's perceptions change. So the driving force behind
migration seems to me to be that "push" from outside
that suddenly breaks an equilibrium—it need not necessarily
be a fact—and people realise there is a wider world out
there, and that starts to get things going. Suddenly, for some
people, it makes them feel poor. I think if you can conceptualise
migration starting there.
Q55 Tony Worthington: Just to be
clear on that, you said the "push" from outside, which
I would have called the "pull" from outside.
Professor Skeldon: Yes, I suppose
it is a pull from outside.
Q56 Tony Worthington: So that, in
explanatory terms, it is knowledge about what is happening elsewhere
that more often causes migration, in your view, than things that
are happening in your own society?
Dr Deshingkar: We studied six
villages in great detail in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India
and we found that historically many of the very diverse migration
streams did start because of a "push situation", mainly
because of drought and unavailability of work locally. Over time,
as more information became available and they had better contracts,
then it became a "pull" situation because there were
better prospects elsewhere. So now people are migrating routinely
because they make more money outside their villages. It is not
just "push" factors.
Professor Black: Another example
we could give on a much more global scale is the great transatlantic
migrations of the latter part of the 19th century and the early
20th century, where again people leaving Europe at that time in
their millions were leaving from famine in Ireland and desperate
poverty in many parts of Europe—and also from religious
persecution in some parts of Europe. Also, over time, they were
drawn by the opportunities that America offered. It is interesting
that a study which was done in the 1950s that looked at how those
migration trends moved over time against the fluctuations in political
and economic conditions in Europe and in North America showed
that, in fact, over time, over a period of decades, the strongest
correlations were with fluctuations in the American labour market
and in the American economy, and that, in particular, migration
tended to fluctuate with building railroads, for example, on which
many people were employed. Even though it took many weeks or months
for information to get across the Atlantic about job opportunities
(so you could not say that somebody offered a job and suddenly
a peasant in Poland upped sticks and went to the States), nonetheless,
in the absence of that information there was still a very strong
correlation between opportunity—the "pull", effectively—and
migration trends, in aggregate. It is actually not too helpful
to separate out "push" and "pull" factors
of migration; both are clearly significant but in different places
and at different times you can clearly make a case that both are
important.
Dr Rogaly: I think it is very
important to avoid generalising about migration as a whole, even
though we need to come to some general policy pointers through
this process, because I think migration, for example, from one
Indian village to another to do hard manual work for about three
weeks is obviously very different to a longer-term, qualified
person going for white-collar employment or somebody migrating
for marriage. (We are just talking here about labour migration).
So I think we need to avoid seeking a single route for a single
explanation. One thing that it is safe to say is that poor people
have access to different kinds of migration. Sometimes people
say that you can either be migrating because you are poor or you
can be excluded from migrating because you are too poor to migrate.
One of the lessons for me is that different people in different
kinds of situations, with different levels of wealth, education,
health and so on—and contacts—have access to very,
very different kinds of migration possibilities. We need to separate
them out. To me, it is almost like a hierarchy.
Q57 Tony Worthington: Just winding
up on this section, if your statement is correct that opportunity
or knowledge is the biggest driving factor then this would mean
that the amount of migration that there has been so far is as
nothing compared to what will happen in the future, because knowledge
will get greater.
Professor Skeldon: That is possible.
We do not want to make too hard and fast a distinction between
"push" and "pull" because, really, the "pull"
creates a "push". As people know what is out there they
realise what they can achieve locally, so the "pull"
creates a "push" and vice-versa. I would not like to
go on to say that the amount of migration would be necessarily
massive. I think in any population the majority of people do not
want to migrate. In cases where there exists the freedom to move,
large numbers of people choose not to move, even though they can
get a better return from the move. So in fact, when you look at
the total numbers who do move they tend to be quite small relative
to a population. So I would not like to give the impression that
we are facing a tidal wave of migration. I do not believe that.
Professor Black: If I could give
a couple of examples: one is the example of whether, as countries
in Central and Eastern Europe come into the European Union and
there is increased freedom of movement, that will lead to more
people being able to come because they have better knowledge of
the opportunities in the Western European labour market. The evidence
from Southern Europe would suggest the reverse: the experience
of Southern Europe (Spain and Portugal in particular) is that
when they became members of the European Union migration actually
slowed down from those countries to Northern Europe and circulation
increased. 1974-75 was the time when the dictatorships ended in
those two countries and by 1985 there were substantial movements
back to Spain and Portugal coinciding with the entry into the
European Union—although we do not know the extent of migration
because it is not monitored in the same way; people come and go
on a much more temporary basis. Another slightly different example,
if you are concerned about what the trend in migration might be
in the future, is a study done by Tim Hatton, who is an economist
at the University of Essex, and Jeffrey Williamson, who I think
is at Harvard, which looks at local migration trends and which
argues that the most significant current factor affecting global
migration is poverty in Africa, which constrains Africans from
migrating to Europe and North America. In global terms Africa
has a much lower proportion of international migrants per head
of population than other global regions. Their explanation for
that is that the poverty levels are so high in Africa that there
are insufficient people who have the funds to afford to be able
to navigate the immigration rules. Their prediction is that if
the Millennium Development Goals are achieved and poverty is reduced
dramatically in Africa in the way we all hope it will be, one
of the consequences of that may well be an increased migration
from Africa.
Q58 Mr Battle: I was under the impression
(probably wrongly now, given what you said) that people moved
about in Africa because they were pushed about by conflict and
war over the border. So is conflict and war not as big a factor
as I have, perhaps, imagined?
Professor Black: People do move
about. As with all migration most people displaced by conflict
do not cross borders. Even with that, as I understand it, the
Hatton and Williamson study shows that the aggregate international
migration, including between African countries, is lower than
the aggregate international migration in other world regions.
Of course, there are problems with all of the data that is available
on the number of people moving around the world.
Q59 Mr Davies: Professor Black, you
have just made an interesting point, and I think it is an analogy
that might have a wider significance, when you used the example
of Spain and Portugal and net emigration from those countries
to Northern Europe—Benelux and Germany—during the
generation or so before they joined the European Community (as
it was) and since then, over the last 20 years, a considerable
flow back. Is there not a simple economic explanation for that:
that 20-30 years ago there was a very considerable gap in aggregate
productivity between Spain and Portugal on the one side and the
groups of countries I have mentioned on the other, and that that
gap has narrowed very much and, therefore, real wages were much
lower in Spain and Portugal 20-30 years ago and the gap is now
much less significant, if significant at all? Therefore, it is
the result of the faster rate of growth of productivity in Spain
and Portugal and the economic development they have had since
they joined the European Community which has caused labour flows
to reverse.
Professor Black: It is terribly
difficult to separate out these different causal factors. Of course,
the growth of the Spanish and Portuguese economies in general
has been a factor in encouraging Spanish people to stay in Spain
and Portugal—and, of course, more recently, to encourage
northern Europeans to want to move to live in Spain and Portugal;
Catalonia, as you may know, is currently actively recruiting Britons
to come and live in Barcelona and the surrounding areas. It is
a more attractive place to go. However, there are other factors
as well. It would be wrong to characterise this as "Spain
and Portugal developed and therefore there was no need for people
to migrate". I think it is more a case that they reached
a certain level of development in terms of this idea of the migration
hump where, as development increases, migration increases as people
are able to migrate, then when you hit a certain level of development
countries become more attractive and then the level of migration
starts to decline again. So you have a hump. Spain and Portugal
were positioned in the 1960s and 1970s some way up that hump;
they had had dramatically increasing levels of migration and,
as their economies improved in the 1980s and 1990s, they have
gone over that hump and the migrational trends have reversed.
Of course, there are still substantial numbers of Portuguese people
coming to Britain to work.
Professor Skeldon: Could I add
something else to that argument? I think it is important to realise
that migration is a demographic variable. There are three basic
variables in demography: one is migration, obviously, and the
other two are fertility and mortality. We know that fertility
and mortality change with development. We tend to trend towards
lower levels of mortality and lower levels of fertility. Let me
come to that one generalisation that we can make, that most migrants
are young adults. Of course, the supply function is significant
here. The number of migrants will depend upon the number of young
adults, and that is a function of fertility; as your fertility
goes down then there are fewer available to migrate. So as these
countries have gone through this fertility transition then you
see a reverse in the migration stream. So this does make migration
complicated to analyse because you have to conceptualise it within
changing patterns of mortality and, more especially, fertility.
That is a very important relationship.
|
